But it was not. She had had enough. The world seemed in a plot to mar her escape. As once before.

Rachaela had gone into a café and tried to eat some toast, drink some coffee. She had managed the coffee. Then she had to look for another, a different hotel. She was not successful, and gradually her road led her back into the cobbled street before the cathedral-church.

She stood and looked up at the gargoyles.

It was easy to picture the men working on the church, clad in medieval garments, on scaffolding. The making of the devils and demons, the grotesques, the foreman’s face used as a model, or the local old woman supposed to be a witch.

Looking up made her giddy, the gargoyles swung out, ready to leap down on her.

The thought came that she might go into the church and sit down, out of the street and the way of the crowd, without the need to eat anything, pretend anything.

Rachaela carried her two bags in under the carven porch, through the wooden door.

Inside, at once familiarity swept over her, oppression, an undeniable sense of relief.

It was the coloured windows. A great dim space filled by polished wood, a stone floor, and light trapped in cages of red and viridian and indigo blue, then scattered in pieces over everything. Even the smell of incense was not unfitting, like the powdery smell of the house.

Rachaela made her way to a pew and sat down. The whole interior softly murmured like a shell, or as a shell was meant to.

There seemed no one else in the church, not even visitors to peer at the organ and the choir, squint at the windows.

No one even praying.

There were embroidered cushions for the knees.

Rachaela had an urge to kneel down and pray. For what? She remembered school prayers, for which she was increasingly too late, Our Father which art in Heaven, the propitiation of a bad-tempered and jealous deity called always compassionate and with a need for praise worse than an insecure adolescent’s.

Was there any God? Logically not. No one to lean on then. No one to understand or to be implored. She was on her own as usual.

Rachaela leaned, instead, achingly on the pew. Her whole body seemed to have been racked, her back and neck were stiff, her head held red-hot wires that wound and bound.

Four days. Oh God, nonexistent father, four days.

She watched the scarlet sunlight break through a cloud beyond the window. The pictures were not insane here. Christ changed water into wine and infants were set afloat not drowned in the reeds. And the lion would lie down with the lamb.

There was a leopard in the church.

It moved so quietly, kept so still between steps she had not known. She had been lulled.